Joel Spolsky killed a Microsoft patent application in just a few minutes - he found prior art and submitted it, and the USPTO examiner rejected the patent because of it. "Micah showed me a document from the USPTO confirming that they had rejected the patent application, and the rejection relied very heavily on the document I found. This was, in fact, the first 'confirmed kill' of Ask Patents, and it was really surprisingly easy. I didn't have to do the hard work of studying everything in the patent application and carefully proving that it was all prior art: the examiner did that for me." This is all under the umbrella of 'Ask Patents'.

I don't quite well understand the under"lying" problem : you mean that when you "invent" something, you mustn't do a prior art or already patented research and just rely on depositing your own patent and leave the system handle the rest (at your own cost) or just sell you product, jeopardizing a future patent infringement ?